Why God Can’t Tell Us What to Do
Many religious people cling tenaciously to the belief that God provides an indispensable foundation for morality. However, when one probes this belief, it’s not always clear what the precise content of this belief is. There are at least a couple of distinct ways in which there can be a relationship between God and morality. One way is a logical connection between God and morality, that is, God—and only God—can determine what’s right and what’s wrong. If this connection exists, it exists for both the believer and nonbeliever. In other words, morality is based on God’s commandments, whether or not nonbelievers recognize this.
Another alleged relationship between God and morality is really a relationship between belief in God and moral behavior. Many maintain that belief in God motivates people to behave morally, or at least more morally than they would otherwise. Put simply, people need to believe in God to be good. Often, this alleged connection between belief in God and moral behavior is based on the presumption that people will not do the right thing unless they think there is an omniscient God who stands ready to punish them for misconduct and reward them for good behavior. This presumption—actually a prejudice—has been around for a long time.
We should aim for a secular society in which everyone can debate policy issues, including issues that have moral implications, in terms that everyone can understand and evaluate. For this we need some shared understanding of morality. This is difficult to achieve if most people persist in thinking God—or, better said, their God—is the source for morality: that we need to rely on God’s directives to tell right from wrong.
For some, secularism has become the ultimate scare word. Those who use it as a means to frighten and motivate their supporters typically don’t provide a clear definition of what they mean by the term, but it obviously is intended to connote something evil and oppressive. Secularism is an insidious menace; it will get you if you don’t watch out. If secularism triumphs, it will be illegal to pray, religious people will be herded into camps, and white bread will be outlawed.
What’s interesting and ironic about this hysteria over secularism is that secularism, properly understood, is the best protection religious believers have, particularly in a society they do not control. Secularism protects freedom of conscience, including freedom of religion; it doesn’t threaten it. One reason some may have such dread of secularism is that they mistakenly equate secularism with atheism (and they further equate atheism with suppression of religion). But secularism and atheism are distinct views and don’t even belong in the same category; secularism is a political/ethical philosophy; atheism is a belief about the ultimate nature of reality, that is, it’s the belief that there is no deity. Espousing one of these views does not entail acceptance of the other. For the purpose of this essay, secularism should be understood as the view that: government should not involve itself with religious matters; religious doctrine should play no role in shaping public policy or in the discourse about public policy; and religious institutions and beliefs should not enjoy a privileged position within society.
What I will address in this essay is whether this association between God and morality can be justified. Must we rely on God’s directives to provide us with a foundation for morality? Or is it the case that it is our own understanding of right and wrong that undergirds morality? Can God—does God—really tell us what to do?
Living Together: The Purpose of Morality
In considering difficult issues, it is often beneficial to clear one’s mind of preconceptions. This is the method I would recommend we follow in thinking about morality. Morality is something that affects all of us, so whether or not anyone has given any thought to the foundations of morality, most people will come to this topic with various presumptions—presumptions that reflect their upbringing, education, background beliefs, and life experience. These will color any discussion of the topic. So to the extent possible, we should try to approach this topic afresh.
To begin, to make sure we are on the same page, let me indicate what I mean by morality. “Morality” refers to those standards of conduct we utilize to distinguish right from wrong and to encourage and discourage certain types of behavior. (“Ethics” is sometimes used as a synonym for morality, but it also has the special connotation of a study or analysis of morality.) These standards can be of different types—very general principles, such as “be kind to others”; rules, such as “keep your promises”; or specific directives, such as “don’t hit your brother.” I will refer to all these different standards as “norms.”
So, if we are starting from the ground up, let’s ask a basic question. Why should we have morality? What is its purpose? Note that I am not asking, “Why should I be moral?”—a question often posed in intro philosophy courses. I do not mean to be dismissive of this question—and I will touch upon it briefly later—but it raises a different set of issues than the ones we should concentrate on now. What I am interested in is reflection on the institution of morality as a whole. Why bother having morality?
One way to begin to answer this question is just to look at how morality functions, and has functioned, in human societies. What is it that morality allows us to do? What can we accomplish when (most) people behave morally that we would not be able to accomplish otherwise? Broadly speaking, morality appears to serve these related purposes: it creates stability, provides security, ameliorates harmful conditions, fosters trust, and facilitates cooperation in achieving shared and complementary goals. In other words, morality enables us to live together and, while doing so, improve the conditions under which we live.
This is not necessarily an exhaustive list of the functions of morality, nor do I claim to have explained the functions in the most accurate and precise way possible. But I am confident my list is a fair approximation of some of the key functions of morality.
How do moral norms serve these functions? In following moral norms we engage in behavior that enables these functions of morality to be fulfilled. When we obey norms like “don’t kill” and “don’t steal,” we help ensure the security and stability of society. It really doesn’t take a genius to figure out why, but that hasn’t stopped some geniuses from drawing our attention to the importance of moral norms. As the seventeenth-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes and many others have pointed out, if we always had to fear being injured or having our property stolen, we could never have any rest. Our lives would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Besides providing security and stability by prohibiting certain actions, moral norms also promote collaboration by encouraging certain actions and by providing the necessary framework for the critical practice of the “promise”—that is, a commitment that allows others to rely on me. Consider a simple example, one that could reflect circumstances in the Neolithic Era as much as today. I need a tool you have to complete a project, so I ask you to lend it to me. You hesitate to lend me the tool, but you also believe you are obliged to help me if such help doesn’t significantly harm you. Moreover, I promise to return the tool. You lend me the tool; I keep my promise to return the tool. This exchange fosters trust between us. Both of us will be more inclined to cooperate with each other in the future. Our cooperation will likely improve our respective living conditions.
Multiply this example millions of times and you get a sense of the numerous transactions among people that allow a peaceful, stable, prospering society to emerge. You also can imagine how conditions would deteriorate if moral norms were not followed. Going back to my tool example, let us imagine you do not respond positively to my request for assistance. This causes resentment and also frustrates my ability to carry out a beneficial project. I am also less likely to assist you if you need help. Or say you do lend me a tool, but I keep it instead of returning it as promised. This causes distrust, and you are less likely to assist me (and others) in the future. Multiplied many times such failures to follow moral norms can result in mistrust, reduced cooperation, and even violence. If I do not return that tool peacefully, you may resort to brute force to reacquire it.
Fortunately, over time, humans have acted in ways that further the objectives of morality far more often than in ways that frustrate these objectives. Early humans were able to establish small communities that survived, in part, because most members of the community followed moral norms. These small communities eventually grew larger, again, in part because of moral norms. In this instance, what was critical was the extension of the scope or range of moral norms to those outside one’s immediate community. Early human communities were often at war with each other. Tribe members acted benevolently only to fellow members of their tribe; outsiders were not regarded as entitled to the same treatment. One of the earliest moral revolutions was the extension of cooperative behavior—almost surely based initially on trade—to members of other communities, which allowed for peaceful interaction and the coalescing of small human groups into larger groups. This process has been repeated over the millennia of human existence (with frequent, sanguinary interruptions) until we have achieved something like a global moral community.
This outline of morality and its history is so simple, I am sure some will consider it simplistic. I have covered in a couple of paragraphs what others devote thick tomes to. But it suffices for my purposes. The main points are that in considering morality we can see that it serves certain functions and these functions are related to human interests. Put another way, we can describe morality and its purposes without bringing God into the picture. So why bring him in? Why the oft-repeated claim that God is necessary for morality—that without God everything is permitted?
Is Morality Based on God’s Commandments?
Many religious individuals claim that God is necessary to ground morality. Yes, we follow moral norms, but what is it that obliges us to follow moral norms? And how do we know which norms we should follow? Isn’t there disagreement among humans about what’s right and wrong, and if so, don’t we need God to resolve these disputes? As Stephen Carter argued in The Culture of Disbelief, the idea of a moral authority “implies the existence of an arbiter,” and the will of God seems to fit this description better than the will of some philosophers.
Undeniably, the view that God is needed to provide a foundation for morality has had many adherents—until the last couple of centuries almost everyone apart from a few philosophers had this view—and among its adherents have been some very smart people, including respected jurists such as Antonin Scalia, so we need to take this position seriously.
Because this is an important issue, we should strive to be precise. In saying that God’s commands provide the basis for morality, we can mean several different, albeit related, things. First, we could be saying that we do not have a way to determine what is right or wrong apart from God’s commands. God is not only connected to morality; his commands resolve definitively what we should do. Some action is right just because God commands us to do it (and wrong because God commands us not to do it). To talk of moral obligations apart from God’s commands literally makes no sense. Second, we could be saying that although in some instances we can distinguish right from wrong without reference to God’s commands, it is God’s commands that imbue moral norms with the force of obligation. Moreover, God’s commands supplement the moral norms we can discern through the use of our reason, and his directives resolve any moral disputes humans may have. Third, we could be saying that the institution of morality is no more than an arbitrary set of norms unless there is a deity who serves as the ultimate moral authority. This position is connected to the frequent claim that without God there is no “objective” right or wrong; moral norms are just expressions of personal preference. Fourth, we could be saying that moral norms lack the ability to motivate us if there is no God to reward and punish, whether in this life or a possible afterlife. As indicated, these positions are related, and there is some conceptual overlap, so to keep them distinct for the purpose of analysis, I suggest we label them. The first position is God as moral dictator; the second is God as moral adviser; the third is God as commissioner of morality; and the fourth is God as moral enforcer. For some believers, to the extent they consider the issue of God’s relationship to morality, he plays all four roles. We will see, though, that God does not and cannot carry out the first two roles. With respect to the third and fourth roles, his services are not required.
God as Moral Dictator
Long ago, Plato, in his dialogue Euthyphro, exposed the fundamental flaw in the first role assigned to God, that is, God as moral dictator, a being whose word defines what is right and wrong. Here is the dilemma that exposes the flaw. Either there is a way for us to determine what is right and wrong apart from God’s commands or there isn’t. Do you think torturing a child for amusement is morally wrong? How about killing someone to take over their property? Presumably, the answer is “yes,” as it would be to any other question that asks about conduct anyone (or at least anyone who is not pathological) would consider morally repugnant. This indicates that we do have a sense of what is right and wrong independent of any commandment from God. You don’t need to study the Bible to find out whether torturing a child is wrong. If we have this sense of right and wrong apart from God’s commandments, then we do not have to rely on God’s commandments. We can determine for ourselves what we should do.
Suppose, though, that a believer insists that nothing is morally obligatory or forbidden apart from God’s commandments. Something is good only because God commands it. This implies we have no independent standard for what is morally right or wrong, good or bad. But if we have no such standard, how do we know that what God commands is the right thing to do? How do we know whether God himself is good and worthy of being obeyed? The answer is we do not know. God’s commands are merely arbitrary edicts that we are incapable of evaluating. As with a dictator, we are just supposed to obey him, numbly and blindly. Furthermore, if God’s commandments are to be followed without question, because there is no way we can tell right from wrong, then he could command us to do things that seem horrible—such as torturing a child—and, according to the dogmatic believer, we would obliged to obey.
One response sometimes made by believers at this juncture is that God would not command us to perform horrible actions because he is good, indeed perfectly good. Therefore, to imagine possible scenarios in which God orders to do a horrible thing is to engage in idle speculation. But this response fails because it assumes we can characterize God as morally good when, by hypothesis, we have no way of determining what is morally good. If we do not know what is good or bad, right or wrong, independently of God’s commands, for all we know he is either malevolent or capricious.
And given some of the commandments attributed to God in the Bible, there are ample grounds for regarding the deity as a malevolent spirit. The Old Testament is replete with divine directives that make God look like a homicidal maniac and an “ethnic cleanser” without equal. See, for example, Exod. 23: 23–30, 34: 11–16 and Deut. 20: 16–18 (God instructs Israelites to destroy Canaanites and various other inhabitants of the land Israelites are to possess); Num. 31: 17–18 (Moses angrily instructs his warriors to kill all male children among captives as well as women who “have known man” but to preserve virgins as sex slaves). Nowadays, of course, the tendency among most, but not all, believers is to pass over such passages in embarrassed silence or to interpret them in an allegorical fashion so that God doesn’t come off as a murderer. This reaction is due to our contemporary sense of right and wrong, which doesn’t permit us to conceive of God as a bloodthirsty monster who plays favorites and assists his chosen people while raining destruction on everyone else. This reaction also indicates that it is our moral sense that believers use to give content to God’s supposed commandments; it’s not the other way around.
To sum up: either God commands certain actions for a morally appropriate reason, in which case it’s that reason that makes the action right, or God has no reasons for his commands. Either we are able to know what is right and wrong apart from God’s commands, in which case there is no need for direction from God, or God’s commands are arbitrary edicts and have no moral value. Either way God does not serve as the foundation for morality.
God as Moral Adviser
Let us proceed now to God as moral adviser. Believers may respond to the dilemma just posed by conceding that we do have a sense of right and wrong independent of God’s commands. On this view, God has created us with the ability to arrive at the proper moral conclusion in some cases by use of our reason. Moral norms are knowable by humans. God still maintains a significant role in establishing moral norms, however. God has instituted morality by organizing the universe in such a way that there is moral goodness and moral norms that further this goodness. In addition, God speaks to us through revelation to supplement the moral truths that are discoverable by reason. These revelations add to the moral norms that we can discern through the use of reason and correct any misinterpretations humans may make of moral norms.
Many Christian theologians and philosophers have maintained a view similar to the above. In particular, those in the natural law tradition, such as Thomas Aquinas, have embraced something like this. The principal advantage of such a position for those who want to continue to use religion as a source of morality is that it keeps God involved in morality while at the same time recognizing that humans are able to make moral judgments on their own. Such a view appears to escape from the dilemma that dooms the position that God is the sole source of right and wrong, good and bad.
It does not work, though. Forget for the moment that those in the natural law tradition have had some sharp disagreements about what is “natural” and, therefore, moral. Two important points. First, insofar as this view admits that humans are able to make moral judgments on their own without the aid of divine commands, then God, once again, drops out of the picture. In conceding that human reason is capable of discerning moral truths, this position also concedes that God is, to that extent, irrelevant. (No, I’m not forgetting that God’s endorsement of morality somehow ensures objectivity.)
Second point. To the extent God supposedly remains morally relevant on this view, it is through the obligatory nature of commands whose goodness we cannot discern through reason. Immediately then, we are faced with the same problem we could not solve when we discussed God’s role as moral dictator. How do we know that these commands are morally valid? By hypothesis, we are not able to understand the reasons behind them. We are asked to accept these commands on trust—blind faith, if you will. One could argue that this trust is justified because of God’s superior knowledge, but does this superior knowledge translate into superior moral understanding? Is this not the same line we are given by tyrants: trust me, follow me, I know better.
It cannot be denied that there have been alleged divine commands that seem strange, if not wholly inconsistent with accepted moral norms. We have discussed some already. Even Aquinas—without doubt the most important and influential Christian theologian—admitted as much. Aquinas felt compelled to discuss how it was possible that God had apparently commanded things that contradicted natural law, in particular his commandments to Abraham to kill his son (Gen. 22:2), to the Israelites to steal from the Egyptians (Exod. 12:35), and to Hosea to marry “a wife of harlotry” (Hosea 1:2). Aquinas’s weak explanation is that whatever God commands cannot be an injustice, because whatever is done by God is, in some way, “natural.” Of course, this is just arguing in circles, so it is not really an explanation at all.
Even more bewilderingly, God appears to change his mind about what is morally obligatory or permissible. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, also known as the Mormons, permitted polygamy early in its history based on a divine revelation. However, in 1890, the leader of the church, Wilford Woodruff, had another revelation that told him to instruct the Mormons to cease practicing polygamy. That this about-face was due solely to revelation, and not to moral reasoning, is evident from the heartfelt and anguished statement of President Woodruff in which he confessed it was only because God expressly commanded him that he told the Mormons to end plural marriages: “I should have let all the temples go out of our hands; I should have gone to prison myself, and let every other man go there, had not the God of heaven commanded me to do what I did do.”
There is no need to multiply examples. My purpose is not to catalogue the weird things God has supposedly commanded us to do, or the various second thoughts the deity appears to have had about his instructions. This is a short book. My point is that the position that sees God as providing advice that goes beyond what we humans can determine on our own does nothing to support the claim that God is indispensable to morality. Precisely because his commands are supposedly outside the sphere of our moral competence, we are not justified in saying that his commands represent morally valid norms. We are not capable of evaluating their moral character. It would be like asking a child to determine whether a page full of equations described the behavior of subatomic particles or was merely a string of numbers and symbols without meaning.
To sum up: this view of God as supplementing our moral knowledge with his commands does not, in the final analysis, preserve any significant moral role for God’s commands.
The Revelation Problem—Why We Cannot Know God’s Commands
There is a larger problem that undermines God’s role either as a moral dictator or moral adviser. It’s an epistemological problem that’s not fully appreciated by many believers. It’s not possible to have a divine command theory of morality unless there is some way one can establish that God has communicated his directives to us. The problem is we cannot know when God has spoken. Consequently, we cannot know the contents of God’s commands because we cannot know whether he has issued any commands.
How are God’s commands supposedly transmitted to us? Through revelation, which is usually understood as a communication from God, or some other supernatural entity such as an angel, in which some significant truth is revealed to an individual. These truths can be statements about a number of things, such as God’s nature, God’s relationship to humans, predictions of things to come, or commands, some of which have moral implications. The three major monotheistic religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and many other religions, such as Mormonism, are based largely on revelations allegedly made to various prophetic figures. It is no exaggeration to say that the critical core of most religious beliefs is constituted by revelation. The vast majority of these revelations are set forth in texts that are regarded as the sacred, governing texts of the religion. Sacred scriptures function as the record of divine self-disclosure. As the Catechism of the Catholic Church states, “Sacred Scripture is the speech of God as it is put down in writing under the breath of the Holy Spirit.” Religions differ over what texts are sacred; indeed, what principally distinguishes one religion from another are disagreements over which revelations are authentic.
Authenticity. That’s a problem isn’t it? What makes one alleged revelation a divine or divinely inspired message and the other the ravings of a madman, the mutterings of a self-deluded enthusiast, or the invention of a con man? A revelation is something that by definition is not transmitted to humans in the standard way we acquire information. Also, the content of the revelation is typically something that exceeds our powers of perception. As the Catholic Church has explained in its official statement on revelation, through revelation God has chosen to share with humans “those divine treasures that totally transcend the understanding of the human mind.” God’s sharing can be done via some inner nonverbal experience, an inner verbal experience, a sign, or a vision, that is, we can feel God’s presence, we can “hear” God inside our head, we can interpret an apparent natural occurrence as a supernatural manifestation, or we can see and/or hear God (or, more likely, one of his agents, as, at least for the Abrahamic religions, God hasn’t appeared much since biblical times). These are general categories; theologians can subdivide them further. Whatever the mode of sharing, the distinguishing feature of a revelation is that it involves a privileged access to the divine such that the claim that a revelation occurred cannot be verified or disconfirmed in the standard way reports of ordinary events are verified or disconfirmed. You say it’s raining outside. The truth of that assertion is settled easily enough. You say that yesterday you were hit on the head by a baseball. This may require a bit more work, but, again, information that’s accessible to anyone who is interested in the question can in principle be obtained to confirm or refute your claim. But we cannot confirm or refute transcendental experiences. The person who’s experienced the revelation may be absolutely certain it occurred, but her subjective experience is inaccessible to others.
This problem has long been recognized. Thomas Hobbes discussed the impossibility of confirming that another person has had a revelation:
When God speaketh to man, it must be either immediately; or by mediation of another man, to whom he had formerly spoken by himself immediately. How God speaketh to a man immediately, may be understood by those well enough, to whom he hath so spoken; but how the same should be understood by another, is hard, if not impossible to know. For if a man pretend to me, that God hath spoken to him supernaturally, and immediately, and I make doubt of it, I cannot easily perceive what argument he can produce, to oblige me to believe it. . . . To say he hath spoken to him in a Dream, is no more than to say he dreamed that God spake to him; which is not of force to win belief from any man.
In other words, for those not experiencing the revelation, skepticism is the rational response. The more plausible explanation for a revelation will always be some natural cause as opposed to a supernatural cause. There is no good reason for me to conclude that God actually spoke to you. Instead, it is much more probable that you had a dream, you are interpreting ordinary thoughts as divine communications because of your religious enthusiasm, or you had a psychological disturbance. (You could also be lying, but for our purposes, let’s assume sincerity.)
Mormons are sometimes ridiculed because Joseph Smith, the founding prophet for that faith, is the only one who had the ability to translate the Book of Mormon from so-called reformed Egyptian into English, which he accomplished by using a seer stone placed in the bottom of a large hat. The seer stone acted as the instrument for God’s revelation. The hat was drawn tightly around Smith’s face so no one else could view the stone and the letters it supposedly revealed. Such a scene fairly calls out for mockery. Those skeptically inclined likely regard Smith’s actions as the conduct of a con man or a person woefully self-deluded. However, much the same could be said for any supposed prophet’s revelation. There’s always a good reason to doubt the report of a revelation.
The New Testament indicates that, from the earliest days, there were plenty of scoffers around. From the author of 2 Peter we learn that there were many who considered the stories about Jesus “cleverly devised myths” (2 Peter 1:16–18). In rebuttal, the author essentially pleads, “Hey, I and some others actually heard God say, ‘This is my beloved son, with whom I am well pleased.’ Really we did. Can’t help it if you weren’t there.” But those who were not there have good reason to be suspicious about a report from some unlearned fisherman that he heard God speak from the heavens.
Similarly, the angel Gabriel first appeared to Muhammad in a dream, after Muhammad had withdrawn to a secluded cave for mediation and prayer. Skepticism about the revelations Muhammad received seems amply justified. To paraphrase Hobbes, Muhammad’s report that Gabriel spoke to him in a dream is no different than Muhammad saying he dreamt that Gabriel spoke to him. A reasonable person should be reluctant to accept revelations, whether they emanate from a person talking into a hat or a person talking about his dreams.
This is not to say that people cannot be persuaded to accept a claim that someone else has experienced a revelation. No, obviously, there are billions of people who have accepted such claims. That’s how we have the religions we do. Paul found followers; Muhammad found followers; Joseph Smith found followers. Not everyone is capable of critical thinking, especially when those around them believe there has been a revelation. In a crowd of believers, it’s difficult not to believe. If one inhabits a world where supernatural spirits are presumed abundant, and one’s understanding of human psychology is poor—in other words, if one inhabits the world prior to the twentieth century—then one will be susceptible to the claim that God has spoken to some prophet. The point here is not about whether revelations are ever believed; instead it is about whether there is a rational justification for believing them. If we do evaluate a claim of revelation rationally, there will always be more grounds for rejecting it than accepting it.
The problem with revelation goes deeper, however. Even the person experiencing the purported revelation cannot plausibly claim to know it is God who is showing himself through the experience. Yes, the person has a subjective sense of certainty about the revelation, but what does that establish? Such a feeling or sensation cannot logically be interpreted as a revealing of the divine unless the person has had some prior experience of the divine to which the current experience can be compared. And, of course, any prior experience would have to be verified in the same manner. So even the person undergoing the mystical experience cannot know that it really is God conveying a message; it could be the devil, a sensation the person himself has unconsciously generated, or the imaginative interpretation of an ordinary thought.
Bringing in the devil as an alternative hypothesis is not an outlandish move, by the way. If we are going to entertain the possibility of supernatural beings, there’s no reason there can’t be demons. In addition, no less an authority than that esteemed theologian Augustine specifically warned believers that demons can easily impersonate angels. In fact, according to Augustine, believers cannot distinguish demons from angels without God’s mercy. But how is one to know whether God’s mercy has been activated? Augustine provides no answer.
Some may think that visions, that is, apparitions that seem to appear outside the mind of the believer, provide some solid evidence of a manifestation of the divine, at least to the believer himself. Not really. Leaving aside the obvious explanation of hallucination, there is again the problem of connecting the experience to God. We say where there’s smoke, there’s fire, but that is because we have experience of smoke being correlated with fire. Contrast the smoke/fire situation with a vision of a figure that suddenly appears before me announcing it’s an angel of the Lord. What experience do I have of correlations between visions such as this and God? None. God is transcendent; he is outside the natural world, so, by hypothesis, I cannot experience God directly. Therefore, I have no more warrant for inferring this vision is a revelation from God than I do for inferring that it is an attempt at deceit by the devil, an alien being, a trick produced by some natural process, or a projection from my subconscious.
But what about visions that appear simultaneously to a number of people? Aren’t these credible manifestations of the divine, or at least something outside the natural order? Sacred texts do discuss some such alleged mass visions, for example, the story of the descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost during which the third person of the Trinity appears to the apostles in the guise of “tongues as of fire” (Acts 2:1–4). Doesn’t this intersubjective experience have some credibility?
Again, we need to distinguish what is rational for someone not experiencing the vision to believe and the psychological state of the persons undergoing the experience. For those of us living today, one weighty reason not to credit the Pentecost story is that we don’t have access to this event except through the much-edited, much-copied-over writings of an individual (or individuals) who lived about 1,900 years ago and who was a member of the cult that had grown up around Jesus of Nazareth. Furthermore, Luke, to whom this part of Acts is usually attributed, did not even witness the Pentecost event himself. This is just to scratch the surface of our reasons for skepticism. For example, we are also aware today that the contents of the New Testament were the subject of much controversy in the first four centuries of the Common Era, and there were many stories about Jesus and his followers that did not make the final cut.
In addition, in assessing claims of visions of God or his agents that allegedly appear to a number of people simultaneously, we must consider the preexisting beliefs of the persons claiming to experience the vision. If the Pentecost vision had announced to the apostles, “Hey, you’ve got this Jesus thing all wrong—everything will be explained to you in about 1,900 years by a prophet named L. Ron Hubbard,” that would be noteworthy because it would suggest the vision was not some imagined projection based on preexisting beliefs. As it is, this purported vision is all too similar to alleged mass sightings of other supernatural beings through the ages—they almost always reflect the beliefs of the people experiencing the vision. For example, not many Jews have visions of the Virgin Mary. Pagan Greeks and Romans had mass sightings of their gods, but not the angel Gabriel. Why don’t we believe them? If we have no reason to credit the mass sightings of Dionysius, Demeter, and all the other pagan deities that occurred in the era before Christianity, we have no reason to credit the mass sightings of Jesus, the Virgin Mary, or other supernatural beings with a Christian brand that have occurred in the Christian era. People project the beliefs they already hold, which is why today in Christian countries it’s always Mary or Jesus appearing on grilled cheese sandwiches, not Aphrodite or Apollo.
Admittedly, those who are experiencing the mass vision themselves have some reason for thinking they are all experiencing something, as they have intersubjective verification. But they have no warrant for going beyond that limited claim. We are familiar with cause and effect in the natural world. We do not have familiarity with the realm of the supernatural. Even if I am experiencing some sort of vision along with several others, it would not be rational for me to conclude this vision is a manifestation of God or one of his agents. I do not possess the prior experience of God that would justify this claim.
There is no escaping this conclusion: revelations are neither confirmable nor self-authenticating. To believe in a revelation requires an act of faith, as the Catholic Church candidly admits. As the late Pope John Paul II remarked of the revelation that Jesus is the son of God, “one can only accept it or reject it.” In other words, one cannot gather evidence and argue for its truth. There is no evidential basis for believing in revelations, and, therefore, someone who has not made a prior faith commitment—which itself is an act without rational support—cannot be expected to believe them.
Let’s take stock for a moment. We entered into this discussion of revelation because it is through revelation that we are supposedly made aware of God’s commands. If God is to have any direct role to play with respect to morality, either as moral dictator or moral adviser, we would need to be able to receive instructions from him. Our analysis of revelation has established that God effectively has no way to communicate his commands to us. Even if he were to transmit a command through a prophet, we would have no way of confirming this was a divine command. But the situation is even worse than this. What purported revelations we do have from God are inconsistent.
The various religions that base their creeds on revelation rely on differing and contradictory revelations. Even within Judaism, Christianity, or Islam, there are deep disagreements about how an alleged revelation is to be interpreted. Orthodox Jews disagree with Reform and Conservative Jews, Protestants disagree with Catholics, Sunni with Shiite, and there are dissenters within Mormonism who still practice polygamy. Given these disputes over revelation among believers, revelation becomes useless as a means of grasping God’s commands. One God prohibits drinking alcohol, while another God says it is permissible; one God demands male circumcision, while another God says you can hold on to your foreskin; one God prohibits divorce, while another God is fine with that; one God prohibits contraception, while another God has no objection; one God prohibits the consumption of shellfish, while another God says bon appetit; one God prohibits work on Saturday, another on Sunday, and yet another has no objection to work on any day. Of course, the sharpest conflicts arise when one God tells his followers to stand firm against, and if necessary to fight, the followers of another God—a situation that still arises in the twenty-first century.
Monotheism is often held up as some great intellectual or moral advance over the polytheism that prevailed among the ancient Romans and Greeks. With respect to the utility of commands from God, nothing has really changed. Instead of disputes among the Olympian gods, we now have disputes among the various versions of the Jewish God, the Christian God, the Islamic God, the Mormon God, and so forth. I referenced earlier Plato’s dialogue Euthyphro in which he pointed out the flaws in the view that we have no understanding of morality apart from divine commands. In one passage in the dialogue, the character Socrates illustrates one of the problems with this view, using a polytheistic example:
[I]t seems that what is pleasing to the gods is also hateful to them. Thus, Euthyphro, it would not seem strange at all if what you are now doing in punishing your father were pleasing to Zeus, but hateful to Cronus and Uranus, and welcome to Hephaestus, but odious to Hera, and if any of the other gods disagree about the matter, satisfactory to some of them, and odious to others.
Substitute “Jewish God” for “Zeus,” “Christian God” for “Cronus,” and all the various versions of our contemporary God for the pagan gods and we can make a very similar assertion. What is satisfactory to one religion’s God is odious to another religion’s God.
There is no rational decision process that would enable humans to determine on the basis of accessible evidence which of the various competing revelations available to us is really the authentic revelation of God. Faith, not reason, is the basis for accepting any revelation, and one cannot say one faith is more reasonable than another as any faith commitment is undertaken in the absence of reason.
God cannot tell us what to do because, among other reasons, we are not able to recognize a command from God. Because God cannot effectively communicate with us, we cannot base morality on his commands.
Those to Whom God Does Speak
Although I have provided reasons why even those who think they have received a revelation should be skeptical that they actually have been in communication with God, I am realist enough to recognize that many believers will continue to think they receive communications from God despite what I say. One reason I am confident in this conclusion is that I was a believer myself. When I was a believer, I was convinced God did communicate with me. Certain thoughts in my head I interpreted as God talking with me. I’m doubtful any argument would have persuaded me otherwise. The experience was too immediate, too vivid, too encompassing.
Talking with God is an everyday experience for many believers. Presumably they too have the same strong sense of an external presence as I had. To the extent I discuss this issue with friends or relatives who are religious, they confirm this. Studies of religious believers also confirm their certitude about being in communication with God. So why shouldn’t those who speak with God on a regular basis accept that the prophets of their respective religions had revelations?
I could carry my argument one step further by asking believers why it is their respective religions do not permit them to have a public revelation, instead confining them to a private revelation. In other words, most religions maintain that revelations that inform us about general, important matters concerning the relations between God and his creation either stopped at a certain point in time or are channeled only through specific individuals. For Jews, there is no public revelation after the Tanakh; for Christians, none after the New Testament; for Muslims, Muhammad had the definitive word. Mormons do accept continuous revelation, but only through the president of their church, who is also considered a prophet. God can inform ordinary, contemporary believers that someone is sick or pregnant or that a car will be repaired on time (a private revelation I had at seventeen), but any revelation that challenges accepted doctrine is peremptorily ruled inauthentic. Isn’t that strange? Doesn’t this suggest that the whole notion of basing important beliefs on revelation is questionable?
But my primary purpose is not to persuade people to stop believing in God. Instead, I want believers to recognize that if they hope to engage in policy discussions with those who don’t share their faith, they need to speak in terms everyone can understand. Even if you think God is talking to you and could tell you what to do, you need to recognize he can’t tell us what to do.
This essay is excerpted from The Necessity of Secularism: Why God Can't Tell Us What to Do, which is available for purchase at these paid links: Amazon, Bookshop, and Pitchstone.
Ronald A. Lindsay is former president and CEO of the Center for Inquiry and of its affiliates, the Council for Secular Humanism and the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. His most recent book is Against the New Politics of Identity. He has a PhD in philosophy from Georgetown University, with a concentration in bioethics, and a JD from the University of Virginia. He lives in Northern Virginia.
August 2024